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"If they're wanting to hurt people they would do it right then and there. But if they're wanting to do something later then at least it gived us hope that there's still life and that we're going to have an opportunity to see our family again."

17.47

Could the Malaysian plane have entered Indian air space without India knowing? India's radar "not always turned on" http://t.co/hVxfTQXK39

16.24 Pretty comprehensive summary of the sequence of events that occurred on MH370 according to what investigators have pieced together - although it is debatable whether the crash theory is the most probable, as the clip asserts.

16.13 BBC World Service report with Greg Candelaria who says he was having dinner with his wife at a Houston restaurant when they both received a breaking news alert on their phones about the missing plane he had been scheduled to take.

15.49

Aviation expert David Gleave provides his opinion on the possible scenarios that may have befallen MH370.

1. Malaysia has confirmed reports that the diversion of MH370 was a deliberate act.

2. Last signal from MH370 was five hours later than previously thought.

3. The families of those on board have raised their hopes that the plane might have landed somewhere

4. The missing aircraft could be as far north as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan or as far south as the southern Indian Ocean.

5. China has expressed its anger that Malaysia has only today provided substantive information

14.41 A man who has relations with passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 clasps his hands

NGHANGUAN/AP

13.44 Blogger and aviation safety specialistChristine Negroniwrites that the British company, Inmarsat - akin to "the brainy bespectacled girls at the dance" - has become the centre of attention as it received the pings which have proven that MH370 must have been flying for over seven hours after take off.

When I called the company for details on this unconventional use of airplane monitoring, David Coiley, business director for the aeronautical division told me, "We have been asked to be a technical advisor to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch," he told me, "and we are unable to comment further."

13.30 A decent explainer by the Washington Post on why we know MH370 kept flying for hours. The now famous ACARS "handshakes" do "not necessarily" show the plane's location. Also, the quality of the information the Malaysian's are working with depands on what the airline paid for, says Bill Waldock, an air crash investigator and a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Think of it like a cable TV package...more expensive ACARS packages come with a console that can receive short faxes or send basic messages. Depending on what an airline is willing to pay for, its planes will be able to take advantage of more and better ACARS features.

13.05 Indian navy ships supported by long-range surveillance planes and helicopters scoured Andaman Sea islands for a third day on Saturday without any success in finding evidence of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, officials said.

Nearly a dozen ships, patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft and helicopters have been deployed, but "we have got nothing so far," said V.S.R. Murthy, an Indian coast guard official.

The Indian navy's coordinated search has so far covered more than 250,000 square kilometers (100,579 square miles) in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal "without any sighting or detection," the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The search has been expanded to the central and eastern sides of the Bay of Bengal, the ministry said.

12.49 China is pretty furious that it has taken a week for Malaysia to brief the public that flight MH370 was deliberately turned off course after its communication system was manually shut down.

"And due to the absence - or at least lack - of timely authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered, and numerous rumours have been spawned, repeatedly racking the nerves of the awaiting families," it said.

It remains unclear as to whether Malaysia had indeed kept silent or if it was just corroborating the information it received before it went public like it said.

Some are speculating that Malaysia was concerned about revealing the fact that the airliner could have flown to Central Asia as it would in turn lead to speculation that the country's jihadists could be involved.

12.23 The change in tone of the briefings given by Malaysian authorities have raised hopes in China, where most of the passengers on board the jet came from, that the plane may have been hijacked instead going down in the ocean.

Many users of China's online social networks shared a news report of a woman who said she had received a missed call from her father, who was on board the plane.

The unnamed woman "said she had gotten a missed call from her father onboard, and the number said 'powered off' later when she called back," the Beijing Times reported.

"A hijacking is better than a crash," said another user of Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter. "Hope Malaysia will not come out and deny it later."

This is the chap who was photographed with two female passengers, one of whom was donning a pilot's hat, in 2011, apparently breaking post-9/11 rules by opening the cockpit door to passengers. One of the women, Jaan Maree, reportedly said they were allowed to stay in the cockpit during the entire one-hour flight and that Fariq Abdul Hamid was smoking.

AHMADYUSNI/EPA

11.37 If the area border areas of China and Central Asia are indeed where MH370 has gone - as is the most likely scenario according reported briefings by unnamed Malaysian officials - attention will naturally turn to western China’s Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.

"The fight against China is our Islamic responsibility and we have to fulfil it," he said from an undisclosed location. "China is not only our enemy, but it is the enemy of all Muslims ... We have plans for many attacks in China.”

The Malaysian prime minister had ordered his search operation to switch from the South China Sea, where the plane's position was last clearly recorded, to the Indian Ocean, after new information confirmed the plane had been turned back en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing by people on-board who had deliberately switched off its radar and communications systems.

His comments, which were made in a statement to journalists at an airport hotel, stopped short of calling the seizure of the plane a “hijack” but stressed the investigation would now focus on the passengers and crew members to identify suspects.

The northern corridor passes through or close to some of the world’s most volatile countries that are home to insurgent groups, but also over highly militarized areas with robust air defense networks, some run by the US military. The arc passes close to northern Iran, through Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and through northern India and the Himalayan mountains and Myanmar. An aircraft flying on that arc would have to pass through air defense networks in India and Pakistan, whose mutual border is heavily militarized, as well as through Afghanistan, where the United States and other NATO countries have operated air bases for more than a decade.

The southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, travels over open water with few islands stretching all the way to Antarctica. If the aircraft took that path, it may have passed near Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands. These remote islands, with a population of fewer than 1,000 people, have a small airport. To the east of that route is Western Australia.

10.13 Incredible schematicdetailing just what a 4,000-mile radius looks like (the distance the plane could have travelled at 539mph for over seven hours). Diagram also gives the best guess for the route the flight took.

09.58 Should be noted that the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, the means by which investigators know the plane was flying for 7.5 hours, sends out “handshakes” which just say the plane had not suffered a catastrophe but do not tell us anything about MH370's location. As far as we know, the plane could be anywhere within a 4,000-mile radius of Kuala Lumpur.

09.55 The Washington Post's reportquoting a Malaysian official telling an AP reporter that the plane had been hijacked has been updated – interesting quote from a US commercial pilot cum aviation lecturer.

“You’ve got an airplane that’s continuing to fly; you’ve got systems that are becoming non-operational. It had to be a deliberate action to turn them off,” said Ron Carr, who spent 39 years flying for the U.S. Air Force and American Airlines before becoming a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “Somebody’s clearly operating the aircraft. I have a hunch it was hijacked.”

“There’s a lot of World War II airfields left over,” he said. “They might want to hold the plane for ransom or hold the passengers for ransom, or they might want load the airplane up with high explosives and fly the airplane into a target someplace.”

“They shouldn’t be missing for a week,” Carr said. “But then again,Amelia Earharthas been missing for many, many years. That ocean’s big, and it can swallow things up rather quickly and rather completely and hardly leave a trace at times.”

09.42 Here is a video of the press conference by Malaysian PM Najib Razak a couple of hours ago

09.35 The New York Timesovernight posted a story which says that Malaysian military radar appears to have picked the plane up flying west, changing directions and altitude - all indicators that someone was steering it long after it stopped communicating with the ground. The fact that the radar was picking up several changes in direction and altitude strengthens the case that someone was flying the jet and that it was not just on auto pilot after a possible depressurisation/hypoxia scenario befell MH370.

09.00 Now that a deliberate act - hijacking or sabotage - is believed to be behind whatever happened to the missing plane, investigators are focusing on the flight manifest for clues as to who might be responsible. Malaysia police, after denying media reports that they had raided the pilot's house for several days, said they raided 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah's residence.

08.30 Good morning. As you will see from the our blog which started on Friday morning and finished Saturday morning, the Malaysian government has confirmed unnamed reports saying communications systems on the Malaysian Airlines flight that went missing a week ago were manually shut down and the airliner deliberately flown off course for 7.5 hours.

The confirmation was issued in a press conference by Malaysian PM Najib Razak, who said it was partly based on signals sent by the plane for several hours after take off, which could not have been sent were the plane to have crashed. He said the world was witnessing an "unprecedented aviation mystery" and that evidence was consistent with a deliberate act (i.e. hijacking or sabotage by the pilot).

Mr Najib said that the plane could be anywhere from "Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, or a southern corridor stretching approximately from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean".

Investigators, many from the US, have now stretched their search as far north as Kazakhstan, assuming the plane flew north-west.